


sought safety, but loved danger

by gogollescent



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-03
Updated: 2012-11-03
Packaged: 2017-11-17 16:41:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/553684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year is 1996, and Kivrin has something to tell him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sought safety, but loved danger

Kivrin comes to him, first. 

India Cohen's Watcher hasn't even reported in: is in fact, at this moment, still dragging her body up out of the reach of the tide, halfway around the world and under the light of a pitiless dawn. Later, Dunworthy will think about that-- how even as Kivrin, well-trained, observant, almost from birth inculcated with a worshipful understanding of the Slayer's first symptoms, was arriving at unavoidable conclusions about the new flush of her strength, there was a man in Japan trying to save a corpse. Kit Botwell would crack three of India's ribs in his desperate efforts to force the seawater from her lungs, unaware that already, in distant Oxford, a young woman had looked up from late-night revisions to feel power suffuse her. 

Unaware and, worse, unbelieving. Later, Dunworthy will think, _I was never prepared at all._

But tonight his mind is full of Norman French and free of bloody undertow. When he answers the door, he expects Finch, or perhaps Mary, come for a drink after a difficult shift. He looks at Kivrin in some surprise, and she looks back at him, her eyes clear, her close-lipped smile strange. 

"What is it?" he says, because her posture fairly hums with the promise of knowledge to impart. The light from inside his flat trembles on her face, although beyond her the courtyard is a blue notation in gloom.

"Can I come in?" she asks, instead of answering, and when he wordlessly steps aside crosses his threshold like she was born to it. Her hair brushes past him, a pale mass; tomorrow, first thing, she'll cut it to a short mop of frizz, but now it surrounds her face like a veil. He closes the door, and thinks illogically she has brought the night in with her. Its clarity and intolerable depth. 

"Sit down," he tells her, clearing the books off the sofa. She sits and then immediately stands up again. "I'm sorry," she says, "I'm a bit-- I hadn't expected it to feel like this."

Suspicion, at last, finds a root. "You hadn't expected what to feel like this?" he asks, and thinks, _surely not,_ and doesn't try to name what he denies.

For another moment Kivrin is silent. "Mr. Dunworthy," she says, her voice loaded with an impatient joy, "have I ever told you how grateful I am for all the help you've been with my training?"

Then he does know.

"Ah," he says, and feels inclined to sit himself. His arms are full of Norman.  He doesn't sit. He puts the books on the side table, half afraid that she will see his face.

"I know you never thought I would have to use it," she says. "I didn't, either. Not really. Not after I turned eighteen."

"Slayers have been called as late as twenty," says Dunworthy, looking blindly at the lamp. "It's only in the past century that fifteen has become the median."

"I know," says Kivrin. He believes her. She's studied the Slayer line more closely than her own Watcher, not that Gilchrist has had time for concentrated academic pursuit of anything aside from his own career for many years now. Another year, and Dunworthy was going to lobby to have her entered into the fast-track program for future field Watchers, under his own tutelage. Gilchrist would doubtless whine about the appropriation of his precious responsibility, but there was no shortage of Potentials at Oxford, some of whom even Gilchrist still had something to teach. Dunworthy would have won his appeal, and Kivrin would go on to be the best young Watcher they'd had in decades, better than he was at her age. In another year. 

He doesn't ask her if she's sure. What would be the point?

He thinks, _as soon as possible, they will give her the Cruciamentum._  

"You're very welcome," he says, "you know that."

"I know," says Kivrin again. He turns, and she puts a hand on his arm. He is conscious above all of how small it is-- how unthinkably white. 


End file.
